


Positive

by 14CombatGeishas



Series: You Were Probably Happier Yesterday [1]
Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Cussing, Doug's life is pretty screwed up, F/M, Pre-show, Sexual Language, Unplanned Pregnancy, copious pop culture references, pre-Anne, pretty toxic relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-10
Updated: 2016-11-15
Packaged: 2018-08-30 05:08:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 9,089
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8519716
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/14CombatGeishas/pseuds/14CombatGeishas
Summary: Doug Eiffel thought he knew how his life worked.  He figured he was about a week from waking up at the Mexican border with no money, no shirt, no memory of how he got there and a story that wasn't not as funny as he'd make it sound...again.  He wasn't going to pretend it was a good life, but it was familiar.  Then his ex-girlfriend/worst nightmare turned up at his door and told him she might be pregnant.  Plus, avoiding a Bonnie and Clyde ending, barnacles and parasitic wasps, The Creeping Terror, the reverse Virgin Mary, fetus fur, and the un-white Waltons.





	1. Mistakes Were Made

Doug’s sixth beer of the day hissed satisfyingly as he uncapped it. _Plan 9 from Outer Space_ was streaming on his battered Dell which laid across his lap like a lover. His feet were up on his coffee table, crossed at the ankles. He tossed the bottle cap over his shoulder in the general direction of the trash bin, not checking to see where it landed even after he heard it bounce twice and rattle as it spun to a rest on the floor.

In other words, it was an average Thursday right on the cusp of his next terrible spiral.  Here he sat, out of work, out of time, out of energy, almost out of money, but not yet so desperate to get away from his own thoughts that he was tempted to smash his whole head against the pavement.  No, he still had the good part of the fall to go.  He’d been on this ride before.  His life was the world’s crappiest roller coaster and right now he was at the top of the hill, he just felt the mechanism release his car but hadn’t yet begun the free fall.  Once it did he had a few fun weeks before things got really bad.  He ground out his cigarette butt in the already too full ashtray before bringing the bottle to his lips. 

He took his first sip and was ready to watch some glorious Ed Wood when the knock came at his apartment door.  He sighed in frustration.  It was almost certainly his landlady looking for the overdue rent.  He closed his laptop and placed it on the couch.  He patted it lovingly, “I'll be right back, Maila.”  He lugged himself grudgingly to his feet, took a long swig from his beer, and crossed to the door.

“I'm really sorry, Mrs. Fernandez!  I know this is gonna sound real George Thorogood of me, but I'll have the rent for you—,” he said quickly as he opened the door, knowing full well she would probably cut him off before he could finish his sentence. But she didn’t, because it wasn’t her.

It wasn’t the tiny, gray-haired widow here to yell at him in her usually broken English (Doug found her vocabulary was _impeccable_ when it came to monetary matters and colorful insults), but someone else, someone else he knew quite well.  She was a little taller than Mrs. Fernandez, but still far from tall. She was younger, too, a year younger than Doug himself. She had big beautiful brown eyes, skin like terra-cotta, black hair shaved close to her scalp on one side, the other side long and curly, a small flat nose, and full, painted lips.  She was charming, hilarious, and bewitching, but also hateful, poisonous, and probably an actual witch.  She could kick his ass without even trying.  She _had_ kicked his ass without even trying.  He always told himself not to mess with her, but he fell for her every time.  He’d kissed her as many times as he’d silently cursed her. 

She was Kate Garcia and Doug wasn’t sure if meeting her was his greatest accomplishment or his biggest mistake.

She was the woman he loved – and hated – most in the world.  Their love was toxic and tainted and it had been all of five years they knew each other.  She was small and curvy, extremely pretty in an intense way.  It was an aesthetic she lived up to.  She had a sleeve tattoo on her left arm of stars and planets and galaxies.  There was a skull-and-crossbones on her lower back and a winged heart on the back of her neck.  Those tattoos summed up their relationship pretty well, Doug had once thought when he woke up before her, facing her back.  They were madly in love until they wanted to kill each other. 

“Were you going to say ‘never’ or were you going to lie to her?”  Kate asked, cocking her head to the side and eyeing him.  She stood there impatiently as if they hadn’t broken up less than ninety-six hours ago.  She was noticeably even more tired than usual, bags bruise-dark under her eyes.  She looked worn out, as if she had been awake for her whole life and was looking desperately for somewhere just to lie down.  She didn’t seem happy with him, which was pretty standard for this phase of their relationship, but she didn’t seem angry either. She looked…unsure.  Anxious, almost.  It worried him.  But he wouldn’t let that reach him.  Seriousness was not something he needed.  Not today, not ever.  Because if he got serious, he was afraid he might never stop.  If he acknowledged the darkness lurking in his head, would he ever be rid of it?

“I should’ve known it was you. I thought I smelled sulfur,” said Doug over the lip of his bottle.  He swore to himself he was going to lighten up on the drinking.  So much for that.  “ _This is beer,_ ” he thought, _“it barely counts.  Besides if Cruella De Vil is here I’m going to need this._ ”   As if he hadn’t started drinking at noon.  He’d rewarded himself for making it that far with his first beer that day. Noon was two hours later than he usually started when he was unemployed and starting to worry where his next meal might come from. 

“I’m pretty sure that’s your apartment.  It looks even worse than usual.  How did you do that in a week?” she retorted as she appraised it haughtily.

“What’re you even doing here?  I thought we said we were cutting our Bad Romance off before things ended more Bonnie and Clyde than usual,” Doug reminded her.  It wasn’t the first time they broke up.  They were deep into the double-digits by now.  It never stuck, they never stayed apart for too long – like powerful magnets pulled apart and then released – a couple weeks, maybe, never more than a couple months.  The record was five months, the average was around one.  But even the shortest it took a fortnight before one of them turned up on the other’s doorstep looking like an addict in desperate need of a fix.  This visit was different. This time neither of them was desperate for the other’s company, ready to forget everything they said to each other, everything they did to each other, ready to just give into the heat of the moment and embrace the ecstasy.  Ready to ignore the consequences for a few days more. 

A few days more?  Who was he kidding?  When did he ever think about the consequences?  The consequences of _anything_?  At this point in his life Doug Eiffel was sure he was born to die young and pretty, face down in the gutter, Edgar Allan Poe style.  For years now he felt like he was on a razor’s edge, Colonel Kurtz’s snail, dragging himself along the blade.  He spent his life ready to die, positive he was already dying, or doing something that would probably kill him.  He spent his life fighting to ignore the little voice that told him he wasn’t as happy as he pretended to be.

Sometimes he tried to make something of himself.  He tried to get clean, oh, three times now? 

Hit restart.  Back into the Air Force.  Just One Drink.  Go to bed before two A.M., wake up before noon.  Get pizza with vegetables on it.  Go for walks.  Cut down to a pack-and-a-half per day.  Basically do anything that didn’t mean waking up mostly naked in a police station several counties away, still slightly drunk.  Sometimes it even worked. 

But it never lasted.  Ever.  He took the same route.  He ended up at the same place.  Down the same shoots, no matter what ladders he climbed.  Same routine.  Same game.  Same gutter.  Kate was part of all that.  She was part of his undoing and he was exactly the same thing to her.  They did better without each other, but somehow they could never stay away. 

“We are.  We definitely are,” Kate told him. “Rick and Ilsa.”

“That's thinking mighty high of us both,” Doug said with a humorless chuckle.  Neither of them moved.  She looked up at him expectantly, waiting for him to move enough to allow her inside his apartment.  He didn’t. He only moved to raise one foot to ankle height and scratch an itch on the back of his leg.

“Let me in, Doug,” she said with deliberate seriousness. 

“No can do.  If you come in here you’ll regret it.  Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life,” he answered, devolving into his best Humphrey Bogart. 

“I walked into that one,” she muttered.

“You sure did,” Doug agreed.  “So, bye?”  He tried to close the door but she shoved her shoulder against it, one booted foot in the threshold.  He didn’t even try to close the door on her foot.  He looked down into her face with surprise, still holding the knob. 

“I’m serious!” she shouted. Then she lowered her voice, “Let me in.  This is important.”

He felt an expression of disbelief cross his features as he let the door fall open again.  “What is it?” 

She stepped back, satisfied, when he fully opened the door again.  She seemed to be debating something, her eyes were calculating, searching his face.  She shifted her weight from one foot to the other, her fingers nervously wound around the shoulder strap of her leather purse, making the material moan under her bloodless knuckles.  “I need to use your bathroom."

He had the bottle halfway to his lips when she said that. He paused.  His eyebrows went up in surprise, then he let out a “ _Ha!_ ”  and shook his head in disbelief, “I’m pretty sure you’ve got bathrooms in Castle Dracula, I’ve even used ‘em.” 

“I’m serious,” she said icily.

“Yeah, I realized that when you tried to use your whole body as a battering-ram against my door, Genghis, I just don’t know why,” he answered.  He didn’t like that look on her face.  He looked down the neck of the beer bottle, at the contents within.  He sloshed it a little, watching the foaming tide of beer lap up the sides.

In response to his question, she reached into her bag and produced a small cardboard box and shook it in front of him.  He realized with a start that she wasn’t shaking the box on purpose, her hands were quivering.  She was afraid.  The contents rattled.  The blue and pink box had the words “clearblue easy” written at the top. But those weren’t the words that caught his eye.  That honor went to the words “Pregnancy Test” written in ominous caps in white-on-pink.  His jaw dropped open, but for once he didn't have anything to say.  He was stunned into silence.  Was she kidding?  Was this some weird mind-game she decided to play on him?  It wouldn’t be the first time she messed with his head, but she’d never gone this far.

She took the opportunity to shove him aside as if he were just another door, pushing him inward and out of her path.  He let her, only moving as far as she pushed him.  He turned his head and watched her as she walked purposefully across the room, past the couch, past the kitchenette, and into the bathroom. He remained otherwise motionless until the click of the lock punctuated the silence and brought him back to reality like a hypnotist’s snapping fingers.  He shut the front door then jogged across the room, putting his beer on the table as he passed it and grabbing his pack of cigarettes off the counter that separated the living room from the kitchen.

“Are you saying you’re…pregnant?” His voice cracked on the final word.  He had to force it out of his throat as if saying it would make it true. 

“I’m not sure yet, Einstein, that’s why I’m taking the test!” she shouted back. 

“But…you can't really be...right?  If it was gonna happen it woulda happened before now, right?” With shaking fingers he took a cigarette from the pack.  He put it in his mouth and began patting down his pockets for his lighter. 

“I don’t know, Doug!  Just shut up!” She growled. 

He took the unlit cigarette from his lips so his words weren’t muffled.  “It’s not like we’ve been careful.  Ever.  Ever-ever.” He added the last two for emphasis, trying to reassure himself that since they'd gotten this far without a mishap they must still be in the clear.  “So you’re not—”

“That’s not how it works and you know it! It’s goddamn Russian roulette and you might just have released the bullet!” A pause, then a sigh, “A stupid Doug Eiffel bullet right into my unlucky uterus.” 

“But…is it a Doug Eiffel bullet?  Is it mine? How can you be sure?  No offense, but the only person who's slept around more than you—”

“Is _you_ ,” Kate finished for him.

“Yeah, exactly. And mine’s a hard record to beat.”  It had been where he was going with that.  He knew he was probably the most shameless person in the greater Houston area.  Plus, he had at least twice as many people to choose from since, while Kate preferred men, one of Doug’s best pick-up lines was, “My name’s Doug and I have zero scruples.”

“It’s yours. I know it’s yours,” she told him.  

“But _how_ do you know?” he pressed.

She sighed, and in a rush said, “the last time we were a thing there wasn’t anybody else.” Her voice got quieter as she reached the end of her explanation.

“…Really?”  His own voice was quiet, matching hers.  That surprised Doug.  They never pretended to be exclusive.  In most of their previous…well you could almost call them “relationships”… she hadn’t been so picky.  They were very open about their indiscretions.  More than once Doug ended up in bed with someone who had been in Kate’s before.  He tried to remember the last time that happened.  Was it the mechanic from Baytown with the David Hasselhoff chest-hair or the cadet-turned-waiter who looked like young Cary Elwes?  Either one was a while ago, at least a few months. He suddenly felt very guilty for – if not being monogamous – at least noticing that Kate had been. 

“Don’t even think about getting a big head about it!” Kate spat. 

“I’m not!” he said defensively, then more gently,  “I’m not.” It wasn’t about arrogance, their relationship suddenly seemed more genuine, more real, more adult.He wasn’t sure what emotion it was that shot through him, but it made him feel almost dizzy.“I’m…I’m sorry, I didn’t realize—” 

“Because I didn’t tell you! Because it didn’t matter!  Just shut up!” Kate snapped, as desperate as he was, perhaps more desperate, to avoid whatever emotional moment was looming over them. 

Doug leaned against the wall next to the door.  He finally fumbled his lighter out of his pocket and lit his cigarette.  He took a long inhale and released the smoke in a pale ghost in front of him.  He let the moment pass and cool.  Disappearing like storm clouds that never broke, like the smoke from his cigarette.  “What’s taking so long?  Don't you just have to pee on a stick?” He asked after a few seconds of quiet.

“I know you have the attention span of a three-year-old hocked up on coke, but it is hard to pee with you yammering at me!”

“That’s never stopped you before,” Doug answered bitterly. 

“You should talk,” Kate’s voice was like acid.  Of course she was right.  They both were.  Drunks didn’t usually have those kind of qualms, not when you’re fifteen drinks in on day three of a bender.  When you’ve reached the point when you can’t see and every other footstep is immediately forgotten, gone forever, when your life is like a movie with handfuls of frames cut out.  You’re lucky if you make it into an alley in time.  They were both beyond humiliation, beyond pride – at the very least Doug was.  He’d waived that right years ago and he knew it.  Another brief moment of silence passed. 

“I thought drinking slowed your little swimmers down,” he muttered. 

“And yours were probably real stupid to start with. I'm shocked they knew how to make it out of your balls.”

It was back to this, their usual two-man show.  Hate-flirting.  Han and Leia but far more toxic.  “Wouldn’t the innate innocence of a baby melt you like water and the Wicked Witch of the West?” he shot back.

“It’s your kid, there is no ‘innate innocence.’  You're like a reverse Virgin Mary,” Kate answered, showing that Catholic school upbringing. 

“Can you really be pregnant?  I thought your species reproduced by laying your eggs in a living caterpillar, eating it alive from the inside,” he was pretty proud of that one and smirked humorlessly around his cigarette. 

“And yours, like a barnacle, just kinda blindly starts shoving its dick into every hole it can find and waiting around for someone to do the same to it,” Kate answered. 

“You know, I missed us…” said Doug dreamily.

“Oh shut up, ass-clown!”

“Brood Empress.”

“ _Puh_ -Lease!” Kate said dramatically, Doug swore he could hear her roll her eyes, “if I could telepathically command an army, do you really think I'd be stuck with you?”

“That depends.  Do you still have the same personality?” he asked, tipping his head back and blowing smoke at the pale spot where the smoke detector once hung.

“Hilarious.” The toilet flushed, the sink ran, and Kate opened the door.  Doug jumped back so he could look at her and, more importantly, the test.  His heart pounded in his chest. 

“What’s it say, Potty Scotty?” he asked anxiously. 

“It takes three minutes, Rob Slob,” Kate told him.

“How’m I supposed to know that?!”

“I can’t believe I’m the first chick you knocked up,” Kate said.  Then more sarcastically,  “How did I get so lucky?”

“ _Allegedly_ knocked up!”  Doug emphasized the first word,“Not proven yet!  I'm innocent as Harry and Sam in _Mamma Mia_!” he put in hastily. 

“You know the real dad isn’t revealed in that movie, right?  Or did you miss that part because nothing blew up,” she asked. 

“Well, according to the internet—”

“Oh my God! Did you look up fan theories about who the dad in _Mamma Mia_  was?!”  Kate cut him off, laughing, “I thought you said you hated that movie!”

“I did!” Doug said defensively, crossing his arms.  “...Mostly.  Look, the songs are terrible but _really_ catchy and— _oh my God!_ Do not put your gross pee stick on my coffee table!”

Kate glanced up at him from the couch when he gave his warning and, still looking him dead in the eye, put it down on the tabletop. He groaned.

Kate made an incredulous “tisk” and said “this is far from the grossest thing that’s been on here. It’s had your naked ass on it.” As she was talking, Doug opened one of his more-forgotten cabinets and began searching the dusty contents for one of the few things he could laughably call a family heirloom: a set of mahogany-stained coasters.  He blew the dust off one and placed it on the table.  He put his cigarette back in his mouth and very carefully grabbed the pregnancy test between his pointer and thumb and lowered it onto the coaster. 

“Really, Doug?” Kate sat on his couch, arms crossed. “Since when do you own coasters?”

“They were my grandma’s,” he told her honestly.  They haven’t seen the light of day since she put her last ginger ale on them. 

“And you never use them for drinks, but now you're putting a ‘pee stick’ on them?” Kate asked, arms crossed. 

“That’s about the long and short of it, yeah,” he said scratching the back of his head.

“What would your grandma say?” Kate asked with mock concern. 

“She would probably tell me we're both going to Hell.” Doug plopped down next to her on the couch and shrugged.

“Really?  She would be right, but _really_ , your own grandmother?”

“She was really religious and we’re pretty sketchy,” Doug pointed out. 

“Huh, really religious and yet she never caught on you were the devil,” Kate said, putting her finger to her cheek. 

Doug sighed, ”I already called you the devil.”  He leaned his head against the back of the couch while lighting a new cigarette with the butt of the old one.  “That’s a repeat,” he stubbed out the butt, leaning forward slightly to do so.  How long ago did they start playing this game?  When did insulting each other _become_ a game?  They were in so deep Doug wasn’t even sure if that was something normal couples did.  It was something _they_ did, it was so much a part of their normal that he couldn’t remember a time when they didn’t call each other names like children on the playground.  They didn’t know how to have a conversation without arguing or insulting each other. They were always somewhere between school room taunts that went with pulling each other’s pigtails and what you screamed at the guy who cut you off in traffic. 

“You just said I smelled like sulfur. That could be anyone in Hell.”

“So you have to steal my insults now?” he asked, but his heart wasn’t in the argument.  He just wanted desperately to pretend they weren’t sitting there like two people in an ICU waiting room, waiting for a pregnancy test to tell them just how much worse they had made their lives.

“Fine, I'll just call you Sauron,” she said half-heartedly.  She didn't take her eyes off the pregnancy test.  The look of fear on her face was almost too much for Doug.  It was crushing.  He wanted to lean over and kiss her, promise her everything would be okay.  He wanted her to wind her arms around him and smile.

They couldn’t help that they always ended up destroying each other. They destroyed everything. That was who they were as people: hopeless fuck-ups. They were kidding themselves if they thought this break-up would stick. If they thought they could get clean and fly right. Hell, for eleven years, since long before he could legally drink, Doug had been promising himself he would one day get sober.

 Kate didn’t deserve this.  Doug found himself putting his arm around her.

“What are you doing?” She looked up at him but didn't take his arm off. She put her hand on his as if undecided whether to throw him off or hold him closer.

“Kate, whatever your pee stick says, I want you to know that I’ve got your back,” he said, seriously.   

Kate shook her head but didn’t say anything.  Nor did she take his arm off her.  They waited the rest of the two minutes in silence. Doug was afraid to even breathe in the direction of the pregnancy test. He kept hoping desperately that it would come up negative, this would all blow over, disappear, a funny anecdote. 

Then the little blue plus sign materialized, staring both of them down.  The silence rang.


	2. Mistakes Were Kept

“It could be the test…?” Doug half-asked, looking sidelong at Kate.  

 

Kate did not meet his gaze.  She did not look away from the test.  Her brown eyes were wide and desolate, her hands gripped her knees.  “Yeah, yeah, it might be.  There’s two more in the box.”

 

The whole process repeated, although it was made even more intolerably long when Kate had to down an entire Poland Spring before she could take it.  During the wait Doug smoked the rest of his cigarette pack.  They both all but exhausted their repertoire of monsters to call one another by the time the second result materialized.  They were down to halfheartedly tossing B-movie creatures at each other.

 

“Phantom Creep,” Kate rubbed her eye with the heel of her hand.

 

“Langolier” Doug grumbled, patting down a new pack of cigarettes.

 

“Hobgoblin” she sighed.

 

“Lepus,” Doug cracked the pack open and carefully selected the cigarette in the rightmost corner.  

 

“Creeping Terror.”

 

While she was speaking, Doug slipped the cigarette between his lips.  He lit it, took the first puff, and tipped his head back to exhale a wreath of smoke, wondering what was about to happen.  He felt like he was driving full speed toward a cliff and his two options were stopping mercifully short or he and Kate _Thelma and Louise_ -ing it to their deaths.  The problem was neither one of them was in control of the brake.  “Uh…Death Bed: The Bed That Eats,” he said, it was the full name of the movie, but it was also the creature and Kate didn’t question it.  They were only insulting each other as instinct, their hearts weren’t in it, they were barely more conscious of it than they were their breathing.  Before Kate could respond, that damn little blue cross caught their attention.  

 

Another positive.  

 

Kate was pregnant.  The car zoomed over the cliff without even slowing.  Neither Thelma nor Louise went for the third test.  

 

Doug stared at the plus sign.  His jaw hung open, cigarette dangling precariously from his lips.  He couldn’t have a kid. How could he raise a baby?  He couldn’t even take care of himself!  The only reason he was alive was sheer dumb luck!  His chest stung, his heart sank, and with that he felt unbelievably exhausted, worn out, as if he’d been running for miles.  What was going to happen?  What were they going to do?  Were they going to go through with this?  Abortion?  Adoption?  Would they actually raise this poor kid themselves?  What would happen to a kid with parents this...well...was there any phrase that described them better than “fucked up”?  What was—

 

But his train of thought was derailed by the sound of gentle sobbing.  He blinked and looked over at Kate.  She  was leaning over, her hands wrapped around her stomach and tears flooding her eyes and down her cheeks. “Kate?”

 

“Shut up,” she whimpered without looking at him.  It was a tone Doug wasn’t used to coming from her. It made his heart slide further down into his gut.  “Just don’t, Doug.  Please just don’t say anything for once.”

 

“Kate…” he began again and he put his arm around her.  Her gaze snapped to him, and for a second he thought she was going to punch him.  Silence hung over them for the longest moment of Doug’s life.  Then she buried her face in his t-shirt.   

 

“I’m scared,” she sobbed into the Skittles logo printed on it.  “I’m _so_ scared.”

 

“Me too,” Doug breathed.  “More than I think I ever have been.”

 

“That’s not helping!” Kate shot at him bitterly without looking up.  “What do I do?”

 

“ _We_ ,” Doug stressed.  “What do _we_ do.”

 

He hadn’t been lying when he said he would stick by her.  He was never more sure of anything in his life.

 

Doug never really knew his father.

 

He left when Doug was about three, and he barely remembered him.  There were a few snapshots in his head, a tall man, made impossibly so from the distortion of memory, who looked a lot like Doug himself, but his eyes were smaller than Doug’s and dark, skin slightly redder, hair straighter.  Doug couldn’t really remember what he sounded like, he didn’t remember anything he used to say.

 

Doug’s clearest memory of his father was when he left forever.  The night before he stood in Doug’s doorway and flipped off the overhead light.  “Good night, Doug,” he had said quietly, like it was any other night.  Maybe his face looked a little sadder in the bluish glow of his son’s _Smurfs_ nightlight, but maybe Doug made up that detail years later to make himself feel better.  After all, there had been no indication that his dad cared at all about what he would do the next day.  

 

Doug remembered being jarred awake the next morning in the predawn by a screaming car horn.  His tiny heart pounded in the gray light as the sound of a fight filtered up to him from the Boston street below.  He heard yelling – wordless, raging, nearly hysterical.  It took a second to realize the sound was human.  Then he recognized the voices.  His parents.  The two combatants were his parents, shrieking like fighting cats, a horrible sound unlike any human voice he’d heard up to that point.  He had heard people sound like that since.  He had been part of fights like that.  It was the sound of animal desperation.  Hopeless and beyond reason.  Screaming until your throat knots and you can’t make another sound.  Crying until you feel dried up like a mummy.  

 

A car engine coughed to life, tires squealed, the horn wailed, and then the roar of the engine grew fainter and fainter.  His mother was still screaming long after Doug stopped hearing the car engine.  Then there was quiet.  What felt like hours of silence passed before the front door to the apartment opened.  He heard his mother crying softly.  He saw her pass his room through the crack in his door, she didn’t stop to look in.  He didn’t risk getting out of bed until he couldn’t hear her anymore.

 

That was the last time Doug so much as heard mention of his father.  He didn’t even know if he was still alive.  His father must have known then what he was going to do.  It took Doug years to realize that he must have been planning it: he had to pack his bags, he had to consider what time of day would be easiest to attempt a clean getaway, he had to quit his job discreetly enough that Doug and his mother didn’t notice.  It was a realization that stung deeply, but by that point in his life he was already used to the feeling of being unwanted.  

 

There hadn’t been many adults in Doug’s young life.  His mom had a brother who lived in Worcester, who Doug very rarely saw.  His uncle showed no interest in Doug and they hadn’t even spoken for over a decade now. He had a grandmother who used to drag him to her Methodist church every Sunday until her death when he was six.  Ironic, considering Methodists didn’t even drink sacramental wine and now more than two-thirds of Doug’s refrigerator consisted of alcohol of varying makes and strengths.  After his grandmother died, Doug mostly raised himself using TV, movies, and books.  Mass media became his parent.  His mother didn’t have the time, energy, or affection for him.  She was aloof even on the rare occasions she was home.  Most of the time she was at work, or out with her friends, or anywhere her son wasn’t. He remembered his childhood as being desperately lonely. He felt like one of the bad ghosts in the _Casper_ franchise, an invisible and unwelcome nuisance.  He was a rat in the walls of his home that his mother didn’t even bother setting up traps for; annoying, but not so much so that she would do anything about it.  It was awful.  He wouldn’t disappear on Kate.  He wouldn’t make his child feel unloved or unwanted.

 

“Oh please,” Kate grumbled.

 

“I mean it!  I told you, We’re In This Together.  I Got You, Babe. I’ll Be There.  Lean on Me…?  Uh...I’ll give you...Shelter From the Storm…”

 

“You’re just saying song titles,” Kate said, with a teary laugh.

 

“Yeah, but I’m also telling the truth! I’m not…I’m not gonna run out on you,” Doug said, rubbing her back.

 

She looked up at him, searching his face, looking for the lie.  “Do you mean that?”

 

“Yeah, Scout’s Honor.”

 

“You were never a scout.”

 

“You can’t prove that.”

 

Kate shook her head in disbelief.  “I’m giving you an out, jackass.”

 

Doug stood his ground, “I’m not taking it.”

 

A long pause passed in which Kate watched him, tears slipping silently down her cheeks and he kept rubbing her back.  “Really?”

 

“Really,” Doug affirmed solemnly.  “I’m not…I’m not going to be like _my_ dad.  Or _your_ dad.  Or Kirk’s dad in the new movie.”

 

“So you’re not going to leave, you’re not going to hit me, and you’re not going to tragically die in a spaceship lightyears from Earth?”

 

“Exactly.”

 

She laughed through her tears.  “You’re such an idiot.”

 

“Yeah, but I mean it!  I’ve never meant anything more in my life, Kate!  Whatever you choose to do…” he let out a breath, “I’m in this for the long haul.”

 

She studied his face.  Her hand gripped his shirt, then loosened.  She leaned up and kissed his rough unshaven cheek.  “You…don’t suck that hard, Doug Eiffel.”

 

“You don’t either, Kate Garcia.”

 

“What are _our_ options,” Kate repeated, pronouns adjusted.  

 

“Well,” he took a swig of beer to allow himself time to think.  

 

Kate stopped him by knocking the bottle from his hand with a hard whack.   “Doug, don’t.”

 

“Man overboard!” Doug shouted dramatically, he fumbled for the bottle but it hit the ugly brown carpet, regurgitating the last of its contents.  “What was that for?!  What did that beer ever do to you?!  Its got a family in the fridge, what am I supposed to tell them?!”

 

“I can’t drink now, dickhead, at least wait until we know what we’re doing before you start hitting the liquid courage.”

 

“Oh right…because of the whole baby situation,” Doug gestured vaguely.  “Booze is bad for babies.”

 

Kate rolled her eyes, “your genius knows no bounds.”

 

He leaned over and picked up the bottle, sighing at the puddle on his rug.  “You should just be proud of me for not lying face down in that pool of beer.”

 

Kate made a face, “I’m really glad you haven’t, that rug is so gross it would probably kill you. I don’t think you even own a vacuum.”

 

“You’d be right about that.  But my neighbor does and I borrowed it once.”

 

“Ew,” said Kate wrinkling her nose in disgust.

 

“Nah, he’s cool.  He looks a little like if Bruce Campbell and a red panda had a baby.”

 

“Can we get back to the matter at hand?!”

 

“Yes, right, right.  Of course.   _This_ baby,” he let out a breath.  It was still hard to believe this was happening.    “The baby we made.  That is in you right now.  Our baby.  Our fetus.  Inside you.”

 

“Yep.  In here,” Kate put one hand to her stomach.  “Growing.  Eating via umbilical cord.  A little faceless blob growing stubby limbs and eyeballs and fur.”

 

“My genetics might not be great, I’m not gonna pretend Vincent Freeman’d go through Hell to get some of my skin flakes, but I’m pretty sure our baby’s gonna be human and not an _Eraser Head_ reject.”

 

“That’s what normal babies do when they develop,” Kate told him, “Didn’t you ever look it up?”

 

“What?  Ew.  No.  And, again, ew.”  Now it was Doug’s turn to look disgusted.  “Fetus fur?  Really?  No, you know what?  Don’t tell me.  Sticking with ‘ew.’  I thought anything about fetuses was illegal down here.”

 

Kate, a native Texan but from a town closer to the Mexican border, shook her head.  “No, that’s just anything that has to do with sex.  Sex education makes Jesus very angry, apparently.  Fetuses are fine as long as you don’t, y’know, yank the bun out of the oven before it finishes cooking…” she trailed off.

 

“Your Body, Their Choice,” said Doug with more than a hint of disgust in his voice.  

 

An uneasy silence fell over them both.  Kate looked up into his face and he found her eyes.  She was silently trying to communicate something to him and Doug felt bad that he was too stupid to figure it out.  “We need to talk about that.”

 

“Talk about wha—“ then it hit him.  About yanking the bun out.   “Oh you mean…” He swallowed.  It wasn’t his decision.  It was up to Kate.  But the idea made his heart sink.  He knew it would be the smarter thing to do.  To end this before it started, but he didn’t want to.  He realized that he wanted to be a father.  He was getting excited about the prospect of being a parent.  He had already started thinking of it as his _child_.  

 

“Yeah.  That.”  Kate sounded even more frank, but perhaps just as frazzled.

 

“…Suuure.  Um…go ahead.”

 

“I’m a waitress and I don’t make a lot of money.  And you don’t make _any_ money,” Kate said frankly.

 

“That’s not true,” said Doug defensively, “when I have a job I make good money.  I’m good at what I do, it’s literally the only thing I’m good at.”

 

“No, you’re also real good at losing those jobs!  You either get fired or you leave them and then you blow all that money on alcohol and cigarettes and Legos,” she reminded him.  

 

“It’s not always Legos,” he muttered defensively.  She wasn’t wrong.  Not by a long shot.  She knew him too well.  But Doug was also right: he was good at what he did.  He’d been messing around with radios since he was in diapers.  He was good at making machines talk to other machines no matter the distance.  He was good at MacGyvering.  He was good at making broken things unbroken on a shoestring budget, sometimes using literal shoestrings.  Hell, his microwave, coffee machine, and radio were all held together with more found parts than their original ones.  He was good at decoding messages, good at intercepting messages, good at pulling signals apart, good at doing all these things quickly and cheaply. He knew the ins-and-outs of the most advanced communications tech in the whole damn world.  If he didn’t get bored or drunk he’d probably be able to get something good.  Something that paid.  Something that might even mean he’d get out of debt and have enough money to at least _help_ support a kid. He broke the silence to voice the thought aloud, “What if…I didn’t do that?”

 

“What?” Kate looked up at him critically.  

 

“If you still want to get…” he trailed off.  

 

“An abortion, Doug,” Kate said and Doug wondered if he was imagining the slight wobbling ambivalence in her voice.  “The word is abortion.”

 

“Yeah, one of those…I’ve still got your back no matter what.”  Then he continued, more hopefully, “ _But_ if it’s just the money thing…what if I kept a job down to the end?  Or stopped this wanton freelance life and settled down with an actual contract and a salary?  Or actually got promoted in the Air Force?  I could make decent money.”

 

“Are you serious?” she looked even more incredulous.

 

“Well, yeah.”

 

“Doug, that would take…that would be _hard,”_ she looked at him to make sure he understood,  “Like, really hard.  You’d have to actually do something.”

 

“Tragic, I know,” he sighed, “but it’ll have to happen sooner or later, right?”  

 

“You’d do that?” she asked, both gaze and tone softening.  

 

“I would.  I will.  If we keep this baby, I’ll keep a job.  A real one.  A good one.”

 

“It wouldn’t be easy to get an abortion.”  Kate paused and looked away as if she was embarrassed by what she would say next, “Besides…over the past couple days, before I really knew, I kept thinking about what it would be like to have a baby and I’m scared but I also want to keep it…does that make me selfish?”

 

Doug let out a breath he didn’t realize he was holding.  “No. No, not at all.”

 

Kate looked back at him, realization dawning on her features. “Do you…want this kid?”

 

“Yeah!” Doug said immediately, surprising even himself with the ferocity of it.  He tried to temper his reaction.  “I think maybe I kinda do.”  

 

“Doug, remember that beta fish you got?  It lasted a week before you gave it to someone else,” Kate reminded him.  

 

“I’ll have you know Gills Grissom is fine in his new home,” Doug told her.

 

“That’s not the point!  I’m saying you can’t even take care of a _fish!_ How the Hell are you going to raise a kid?  And me?  I’m not exactly June Cleaver.  I saw so many of my high school friends get knocked up and screw up everything and I told myself I would _never_ be like that.  Never have kids.  Kids ruin everything.  But…but now…”

 

Doug smiled at her reassuringly.  “Sure, neither of us are really the classic parental types.  But maybe we don’t have to be, y’know?  Maybe we can be…new and improved parental types. We both know what makes a crappy childhood; we could make sure this kid...doesn’t have one.  We could do all the stuff parents do on TV and none of the stuff ours did in real life.  Maybe we’ll be good at it.”  Kate smiled and Doug continued, becoming more excited.  “You could take down anybody who tried to mess with our kid.  You’d just give ‘em that stink-eye of yours and they’d back down.  You can teach our kid how to throw a real punch.  When you get old you’ll make a badass abuela.”

 

She smiled that proud half smile of hers.  “You’d be the _sensitive_ one.  The one our kid would go to if something went wrong with their friends or when they had a crush on somebody.  You would always be there to listen.”

 

“You could teach them how to read.  Help them write book reports.  I’m too dumb for that.”

 

“And you could help with their science fair projects, make a telegraph out of a potato or something.”

 

Doug grinned stupidly.  He really liked the image they were painting.  It filled him with an unfamiliar warmth.  He had already begun to imagine this little child, genderless and ageless in his imagination, but now slowly the features were beginning to form.  Kate’s nose.  His eyes.  Kate’s mouth.  His freckles.  Then Kate broke the illusion.  

 

“But there’s also adoption, Doug.”

 

“Yeah,” Doug said deflating slightly.  

 

“As an option,” Kate said but Doug realized she sounded even more unsure than she did about the abortion.  

 

“Yeah.”

 

“But you don’t like that idea.”

 

Doug was taken aback.  “This isn’t about me.  I’m not…I’m not gonna force anything on either of us, but…” he swallowed and rushed onward like a bullet train, “I can’t explain it Kate, but I’m getting excited about this!  About being a dad!  Maybe I’m nuts, maybe this is gonna blow up in our faces like everything else does, but what if it _doesn’t?”_ He looked hopefully at her, “What do you think?  What do you want?”

 

“I want…I want…” Kate stopped and shook her head, “I want this to be _easy_.”

 

“Well, that ain’t happenin’.  What’s wish number two?”

 

Kate paused then let out a sound somewhere between a laugh and a sob, “I want to keep the baby.”

 

“You’re not just saying that?” Doug asked nervously.  

 

Kate looked serious.  “Doug, you pumped a baby into me, if I didn’t want it I would be ignoring you harder than than the Ministry of Magic ignores health and safety regulations.  I would already be looking up the nearest clinic.  I want to keep the baby!  I want to be a mom!”  

 

Doug grinned and kissed her on the forehead.  “Then we do it!  We raise this kid!”

 

Kate laughed again.  She sat up and hugged him.  “We’re going to have a baby!”  

 

“Woo!  Baaaaby!” Doug cheered, getting to his feet and pulling her with him.

 

He spun her into him, like two dancers, and Kate wrapped her arms around him, moving to music they both seemed to hear. “This is such a bad idea, my life is a mess!” But she was laughing, grinning.

 

“So’s mine!  So we clean ourselves up!  We start acting like grown-ups!  We do this!  We really do this!” Doug had never been more sure of anything in his life.  Kate turned them, taking the lead in their impromptu dance.  Doug followed.  It was what he was best at, following.

 

“Oh my God!  Oh my God, Doug, we’re going to be parents!” She was practically hysterical, tears in the corners of her eyes but still laughing, still smiling.  

 

Doug was breathless from it, his face hurt from smiling, and his own vision swam with tears.  “We’re gonna be parents!”

 

“This is so crazy!” Kate buried her face in his chest for a moment. “This kid is going to be so messed up.”

 

“But no kid’s ever had parents who loved them more,” Doug assured her.  

 

She looked up at him and nodded, “ever.”  

 

“We’ll be the un-white Waltons,” Doug agreed.  “We’ll be _better_ than the Waltons.  People will think they should have made a sappy 1960s TV show about _us_.”

 

Kate looked very seriously at him as they went into another spin.  This time Doug was spun and Kate dipped him despite his being nearly a foot taller than her. “We can’t be together,” she said.  “We can’t be a couple.”

 

Doug laughed.  “Oh God no, we’re _terrible_ for each other!”

 

Kate looked relieved that he agreed with her.  “And we need to get sober,” she added.

 

“We’ll do the twelve-step thing!” Doug said, “it worked for Stephen King.”

 

“It’s still not going to be easy…we’ll probably die,” Kate said with a smile.  

 

“Then we’ll die!” Doug answered, then he realized he was so caught up in this high he wasn’t entirely sure what he was saying.  “No, forget that, we won’t die.  Dying is off the table.”

 

“Right, it won’t happen.  No dying,” Kate said.  

 

“Just _feeling_ like we’re dying,” Doug warned her.  She hadn’t been at this whole alcoholism thing as long as Doug had.  Most people didn’t take their first drink at twelve and weren’t locked-in by fifteen.  There were brief of Doug’s life after that in which he had been clean.  The first time was his senior year of high school.  He and a handful of friends were caught with booze out behind their high school by a couple of cops with nothing better to do. The math was pretty easy: (four brown and black kids + alcohol) + (cops + good ol’ ‘Murican racism) = Doug goes to military school to avoid a record.  The first few weeks there had been murder and the one time he was caught sneaking in a bottle of whiskey he ended up having it poured over his head and being ordered to do several thousand pushups.  His arms still ached thinking about it.

 

That had been his longest stint of sobriety, between the ages of 17 and 19, he hated almost every minute of it.  But as he got older he learned to function pretty well with a healthy dose of the dog that bit him.  He detoxed during the day, retoxed every night.  A couple of gulps from a hidden flask during the day to hold him over and a thermos of coffee and two packs of cigarettes to balance it out.  Easy.  Usually.  Sometimes something would happen and it would get Teenage Doug bad again, unable to even leave the house without an unhealthy buzz to drown out the dark. That was when he got fired.  Whenever his conscience made him try to get sober again it was only a matter of time before he fell back into the bottle, muttering “I wish I could quit you” to his whiskey glass.  

 

“But that’ll stop, right?” Kate asked a little nervously.  Kate had been a little older when she just gave into her genetics and started drinking.  She was a little less callused.  A little less seasoned.  Needed a little less to numb herself.  She also always managed to last a little longer when they tried the _28 Days_ thing.  She was stronger than he was, Doug always thought.  He still did.  

 

“Yeah.  I think?  Yeah.  Lots of people clean up.  Look at Robert Downey Jr.  Besides, we gotta do it.  We’ve got a baby to think about,” he grinned again and put a hand to her stomach.

 

“We’ve got a baby to think about,” Kate whispered.  She held his hand on her belly for a moment.  “Oh God, I feel like I’m on a cloud.”

 

Doug knew exactly what she meant.  He practically felt like he was floating.  Distantly he knew they’d just signed themselves up for 18+ years of 24-hour work, that they were tied together now no matter how much they hated each other, that he didn’t know how to take care of his adult ass let alone a baby, that this time he couldn’t let himself fall back off the wagon no matter how much better the dirt seemed, that they might both be making the biggest mistake of their lives and that this mistake wouldn’t just impact them but also a third innocent life.  But he didn’t care. All those fears and conditions seemed unreal in the heat of this moment.  He was imagining pushing swings and catching fireflies and reading _Goodnight Moon_.  He was too wrapped up in the warmth and love he already felt for this unborn child.  He felt as if this was what he was supposed to be, to do, that he should be a dad.  It was stupid, but it was perfect. “Right?!  We’re crazy!  This is the dumbest thing we’ve ever done!”

 

“Dumber than when we tried to sneak over the border without passports but with that bottle of snake wine,” Kate said.  

 

“Dumber than when we got stuff pierced in that club bathroom,” Doug added.  

 

“Dumber than when I picked a fight with that bouncer,” Kate grinned.

 

“Dumber than the time I tried to drink anti-freeze,” Doug continued.  Then, as an afterthought, “or rubbing alcohol.  I don’t know which of _those_ was dumber.  But if you add enough water rubbing alcohol isn’t _that_ bad.”

 

“But we’re done doing that stuff.  We’re adults now.  Real ones.”

 

“ _Aaah!  Real Adults_ ,” snickered Doug.  Then, after catching sight of Kate’s unamused expression added, “We had to grow up eventually anyway.”  

 

“We’re doing this.  We’re having a baby and we’re raising it,” Kate said, her voice firmer but still fringed with disbelief.  She laid her head on his chest for a moment.  “We’re insane.”

 

“It’s dumb and crazy but _I’m_ dumb and _you’re_ crazy!  So it’s perfect!” Doug assured her.

 

“We’re going to be great!” Kate said.  “Right?” she added looking to him for support.  

 

“We’re gonna be great!” Doug agreed enthusiastically.  When he repeated himself he was a little more unsure, “We’re gonna be great?” Deep breath, more confidence,  “We’re gonna be great.”

 

“We will,” Kate said with such calm confidence that Doug almost believed her.  

 

Doug swallowed.  The prospect of sobriety was starting to nag at him like the Grim Reaper himself.  Doug felt like the protagonist on the cover of an old EC comic, the foolish young teenager returning home, never suspecting a monster was waiting just on the other side of the door.   _“How queer,”_ she thinks, _“It almost feels as if someone were watching me…”_ He took a deep breath.  “Lemme…lemme just…” he looked down into Kate’s curious face.  “One last row of tequila shots?  Just…to send it off.”

 

Kate frowned, pushed away from him.  “If you have to.”

 

“Kate…” Doug raised his hand then let it drop.  “C’mon.  I can’t just…I promise this is the last time.  After I’m done we pour everything I’ve got in the house down the sink.  Everything.”  

 

That seemed to appease her.  “I get to help pour it all out.”

 

“It’s a two-person job,” Doug said.  “Besides if one of us tried to do it alone we’d probably end up drinking it.”

 

“Probably,” Kate sighed.  “You’ll help me with mine?”

 

“We can go over there as soon as we’re done here,” Doug agreed.

 

Doug crossed to the kitchenette and ground out his cigarette so both of his hands were free.  He turned his back to get out six shot glasses from the cabinet (each emblazoned with a different _Star Wars_ character) and bring down the half-empty bottle of golden tequila from the top of his fridge.  He didn’t bother with salt or sugar or even lime.  He was too anxious.  Too excited.  Too jazzed to try anything even remotely fancy.  The only thing keeping him from just chugging it straight from the bottle was the fact that there was enough left to put him out of commission, possibly forever.  “Last row.  I promise.  Last row ever.  Cold turkey.  100%.  This kid is not gonna have Falstaff for a dad.  I promise.”  

 

“I’m holding you to that,” Kate said, arms crossed.  “I can’t do this alone.”  

 

“You won’t.  Ever,” Doug’s hands were shaking with excitement and anxiety, but the first couple of shots steadied them substantially.  He took them quickly, barely pausing between them with the ease of a seasoned veteran.  After he was finished he put the glasses in the dishwasher.  Then he crossed to the sink, uncapped the tequila, took a breath, closed his eyes, swallowed, and poured it out.  

 

He heard Kate make a sound of surprise behind him.  He heard her footsteps and then felt her arms around his waist.  He opened his eyes and looked over at her.  She gave him a warm smile, which he returned.  “Wanna get that Johnny Walker?  It cost too much for me to part with on my own.”

 

“On it,” Kate saluted him and got the scotch off the top of the fridge.  If followed the tequila down the sink.  It was almost physically painful for Doug and judging by the look on Kate’s face the same was true for her.  

 

“We can do this,” Doug reminded both her and himself.  

 

“We have to do this,” said Kate.  

 

It was agonizing pouring it all away.  Doug wasn’t sure how long it took but it felt like hours.  Sometimes he’d stop and lean across the sink taking a deep breath.  This was going to hurt.  He looked over at Kate.  As usual she had a look of determination Doug could never muster.  She had strength that he admired, that he never had.  Hopefully she could lend some of that to him.  

 

He was going to need it.

**Author's Note:**

> [Check out my Tumblr :3](http://queenofthecommunistcannibals.tumblr.com/)


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